Lo, the Poor Buffal

When a buffalo is spotted in the middle of Texas, a retired buffalo hunter comes out of retirement.

It's a cheap effort for the Columbia cartoon department, with poor character design, simple background work, and Stan Freberg doing all the voices. He does them as imitations of other well-known voice artists, including Kenny Delmar as Senator Claghorn and Arthur Bryan's Elmer Fudd. Perhaps he was trying to convince the folks at Warner Brothers to get rid of Mel Blanc.

Well, if I never thought I'd see an animated cartoon short from the '40s that would qualify as bland and boring, that may be because I'd never seen anything from the latter Columbia/Screen Gems animation output until now with this: Lo, the Poor Buffalo. From the title character who talks and sings like Elmer Fudd (only with a falsetto) to the Yosemite Sam-like Buffalo Billingsly character (with some of Foghorn Leghorn's speech patterns) to the stereotypical cartoon American Indian, these are some of the most unappealing characters I've ever seen from cartoons made in this era. While there's plenty of good animation and some amusing gag action (such as when three buzzards swoop down to strip a literally shot jeep or do the same to the three main characters) there's also some lame sound effects (such as the "pop" noises when the characters get shot "dead"). Since I just passed the 10-line limit, I'll just say only animation completists who are curious about these rare Columbia cartoons should check this one out at least once. Stay away, otherwise.